Featuring a live musical score performed by Music Box House Organist Dennis Scott

One of the most perverse and unpredictable films of the silent era, this nautical revenge yarn alternates appalling sadism with prayerful longing for days gone by. Hobart Bosworth stars as Captain Oscar Krug, a lumbering taxidermist whose quiet life off the coast of Maine is interrupted by America’s entry into World War I. As an American of German descent, Krug must prove his patriotic bona fides by enlisting but even he underestimates the depravity of the enemy (a slick and smarmy Wallace Beery) and the destructive power of the U-Boat. The thinking man’s anti-Hun picture, BEHIND THE DOOR hit theaters a year after the Armistice and rubbed sea salt in America’s still-festering wounds. 

35mm print courtesy of San Francisco Silent Film Festival Collection, Library of Congress

Co-Presented by The Chicago Film Society